y e a r o n e // crawling
This is a collage I made in the first few weeks of Freshman fall. I was a weird kind of scared, where I didn't know what I was doing (with my life? with my majors?) but I wasn't pressed enough to do anything about it besides wait and hope that I would soon feel like I was hitting my stride. The word for this year is CRAWLING. Because that's what I was doing-- beginning to rise, to curl into myself to prepare for an eventual becoming that I had no reason to believe was on its way. I dabbled a lot this year, trying so many different things and introducing myself to different worlds: tried some INFO classes, some LSJ classes, my first internships, my first articles, dipping my toe into creative writing... a lot of baby steps. We are curious what will come to fruition over the next few years, what will rise and rupture...
The first Honors class I took in my fall quarter was entitled "The Record of Us All' and to speak frankly, I didn't care much for it then and do not care much for it now even with the rose-colored glasses of hindsight and nostalgia. The lack of structure in the class and the invisible rubrics combined with the inconsistent grading had me genuinely considering dropping out of the Honors program, until some seniors let me know most of the Honors classes they had taken were nothing like this one, which reassured me into staying an extra quarter. I have fond memories of crying on the bus home after receiving the grade for my midterm paper. But as difficult as the experience was, a rude awakening was what I needed. This class taught me that college was going to require flexing my brain in ways that I maybe wasn't trained in after the last year and a half of my high school experience was reduced to zoom classes. I needed to work harder and this class pushed me to do so.
In Winter, I was eternally grateful for not having dropped out of Honors that fall because then I never would've been able to take The Science of Human Values. I wasn't sure whether or not to include this because it's not totally crucial to my academic or creative journey, but this class was SO crucial to my personality. I've never been much of a science girl but this class gave us the freedom to research whatever we want for our final project, and for some reason my strange little brain got STUCK on our Jane Goodall + Monkeys unit. I created a final project investigating what mental ilness's look like in monkeys and I know it doesn't sound revolutionary, but it was weirdly healing to make. And more importantly, it gave me a new personality trait as "girl who is weirdly obsessed with monkey anthropology and in another life totally would've been the next brown Jane Goodall." It's always interesting to find the strangest most niche things end up being important to you and make an impact on your heart.
In Spring, I was super excited to see that there was an Honors poetry class offered! It was 2 credits and pretty low stakes, so I was excited to take it. I had always loved to read and secretly wrote cringe notes-app poems like many other 18 year old across the country, so I was interested in exploring my creative side in a more structured and "public" environment. God, it was like the sediment inside of me was rearranging itself into its natural shape for the first time. Looking back, I don't know how I went so many years of my life without Writing On Purpose like this class made me. The course focused on the intersection of the brain and the healing power of poetry and the visceral-ity of my emotions that I was able to put into something tangible with these course materials, god. At the end of the quarter, we made a little chapbook and had a reading at the U bookstore. For some context, I am not the best physical speaker. During my reading I did end up tearing up a little, despite the poems not being about the craziest most emotional things, but I did share my work with the world and I never looked back. (Even though looking at this poem I wrote back then now has me cringing a little and I'm itching to edit it. But let's let history stand on it's own, I guess.)
Also that Spring I took my first INFO class (besides 200, which was taught by the same man as The Record of Us All in that same quarter so no comment) and I was scared! At this point I was thinking of potentially doing and INFO minor, depending on how this class went. And I was terrified going in, because I did Not consider myself to be a Coder Girl Woman In Stem. But haha! I had a blaaaast and it was nowhere near as hard as I thought it would be. I could code! A whole website with my group! And we were able to make it centered on hate crime analysis! This was a pivotal moment in realizing that my love of social justice and my brain-itch for Data could co-exist... but I was still scared, still wobbling on my baby freshman legs... unsure
My first ever internship was from September 2021 - March 2022 with an organization called The Washington Bus. I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to get an internship in my goal field right off the bat fall quarter of my freshman year, and even more lucky that I learned so much that shaped the next four years of my life. This was my first experience as an active participant in the Washington state legislative session and I can’t believe I thought I knew what the bill-making process was before this internship. Being so much closer to the moving system was such a different experience compared to reading about it in a textbook or understanding the legislative process in an abstract sense. During the course of this internship, I felt comforted in my decision to major in LSJ because of the way in which it combined law and policy with the societal impact and context it is rooted in.
That Spring, I also started to write for The Daily UW! This was something I was really looking forward to joining and stepping my toe into in College, so I stayed on the lookout for their applications at the start of Spring and jumped at the chance. The process was a lot more intense and hectic than I had suspected, and there were students who were much more dedicated to their journalism careers than I was. But even if I wasn't set on journalism as a career, joining the Daily was a really special experience. I learned a lot, not just in terms of writing succinctly, but also with getting over my fear of talking to people! Cold emailing people for interviews and then conducting said interviews is amazing exposure therapy. What I loved most was talking to these people, guiding them with my questions and seeing a story begin to shape. My first article was on the Undergraduate Research Symposium, and I ended up writing a variety of articles over the next few years, ranging from TikTok trends, to reproductive justice, to horoscopes, to coverage on a Professor's new book!